A journey to small places

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

William Blake!

After flying back to the bubble to upgrade my fuel scoop and buy a new ship I decided to pop into the engineers to see what was required to upgrade thrust and FSD range. I have never visited an engineer before and after spending about an hour clicking just to get my standing up for second level I just...just couldn't continue, it contains all the elements I find most depressing and off putting in a game all rolled up into one package, the RNG, the endless grind to get mats, the sitting there clicking buttons endlessly, so level 1upgrade is all I will ever get from engineers I guess!

After that experience I had to go back and do something I enjoy, so I have started a new thread called "A journey to small places."

This is a tour to the potato shaped planets and moons, the tiny rocks like grains of sand, William Black seemed appropriate. I will search out reports of tiny bodies and large rocks, visit them, explore them and post here my findings and feelings. I will list them here on the first page. There is only one criteria for my journey, the body in question must be under 200klms in radius, I don't care how far I have to travel to get to it, although the further away ones may take a while to get to. Feel free to send me names and links. I am starting here, stand by for my first report!

Great mission, I always seek out these worlds. If I recall correctly the FDEV team showed a world under 100km in radius during the 'how to build a real planet' live stream. Here is my personal smallest, a bit of a trip but a really nice area.

Good luck Commander. I generally look when I scan a system to see if there are any 'small worlds'.
I haven't done very well though and often the GalMap graphics are very misleading so a long SC to what seems 'small' turns out to have a radius of 1000+ Km

ps
selling some exploration data to get immediate level 5 access and then collecting the 'stuff' to get a good FSD is worth it if you can bear it for a few days!

Great mission, I always seek out these worlds. If I recall correctly the FDEV team showed a world under 100km in radius during the 'how to build a real planet' live stream. Here is my personal smallest, a bit of a trip but a really nice area.

Thanks for that CMDR, it's one I will check out for sure. Meanwhile I just traveled 700+ly to a system that was supposed to have a tiny planet and it turned out to be nearly 400klms in radius

I have completed my first two targets and will be updating later today, be sure to check it out!

Good luck Commander. I generally look when I scan a system to see if there are any 'small worlds'.
I haven't done very well though and often the GalMap graphics are very misleading so a long SC to what seems 'small' turns out to have a radius of 1000+ Km

ps
selling some exploration data to get immediate level 5 access and then collecting the 'stuff' to get a good FSD is worth it if you can bear it for a few days!

I know what you mean, it would be nice, but I can probably increase my jump range anyway by selling my military grade bulkheads and lightening the old girl up a bit, but I don't consider jump range a huge issue because it gives me the opportunity to check out more systems on the way, upgraded thrusters would be really nice though for searching planetside. I have unlocked one engineer, I forget the name, the one you have to deliver 1 metalloy to and the first upgrade was easy, but the next one requires me to do stuff I just don't want to do, so it isn't happening, oh well.

I think the engineers put a huge spanner in the "play it the way you want" paradigm. Still I can get along without them, no big deal.

Something that may help BaldEagle, you can actually see the radius of the bodies from the system map before scanning them, just selected the detail tab and hover over the relevant body, it doesn't tell you a lot, but it does tell you the radius!

Welcome to my first report on the small places we find around us. This first body is right near my upper edge for reporting at 195kls but I have noticed there are steps involved in body size. There are huge numbers of 1000klm+ radius, a large number between 500klm and 1000klm, after that the numbers drop off dramatically. Bodies under 500klms tend mostly to be moons and you see a few of them between 250klm to 500klm, under 250klm is quite rare, under 200klms are almost never seen.

So Col 285 Sector PD-S c4-11 1, what is it like? It's surprisingly spherical, most small bodies under a few hundred klms are often battered and distorted by large craters, often weird potato shapes so in that regard our first body is not a common one even for small bodies! You can see both sides here;

Now there are three splash craters, at least that's what us searchers for volcanism and life have been calling them, one reasonably large and two quite small ones. Splash craters are flat bottomed craters with clear debris ejection stripes in all directions, the large one is centered in one of the pictures, the other two, much smaller are in the lower half of the other picture. With our experiences finding life it has been surmised that most if not all of these types of craters have a small blue POI near the center marking either a mineral resource or alien life. With these small bodies I have taken the opportunity to check all the splash craters on each body. Sure enough in every single case on this body that is the case.

There's another unusual thing about this body, it's a planet rather than a moon, here are the details;

Apart from that it's remarkably uninteresting. No large canyons, no huge mountains, 0 axial tilt, 0 orbital eccentricity, tidally locked. I took one more picture for purely aesthetic purposes;

I also love these small rocks, and I do hope FDev will allow greater variety of shapes and proper asteroid looking things, like Ida. What is also a challenge is to find a small ice world - since the mass/gravity is also capped at the low end, and ice worlds tend to be light.

Having spent much of my gametime with exploration, I'm now enjoying the bubble and the 'grind' to rank up with engineers. I was winterdicted, visited many stations (so far the high tech is my favourite, although I haven't seen tourist-garden station yet) and generally getting my dose of bubble.

I was lucky to find record breakers at both ends for land-able planets during the same day when I was hunting high gravity planets a few months ago. 9.90 G for the high gravity and 137 km radius for the smallest. One day, in the near future, the hunt will continue! Still need to find an airless planet over 10 G

I was lucky to find record breakers at both ends for land-able planets during the same day when I was hunting high gravity planets a few months ago. 9.90 G for the high gravity and 137 km radius for the smallest. One day, in the near future, the hunt will continue! Still need to find an airless planet over 10 G

Thanks duckofdeath, I will look at that one when I get a chance, meanwhile;

HIP 22588 2 a.

This again was a very spherical small moon without many canyons or other outstanding features, it seems to be suffering from what has been called the beigeification of the bodies in ED. No volcanism again but a number of splash craters. Another note on those, there are some flat bottomed craters look very similar, I have checked a few as far as I can tell they are actually splash craters, but so old the ejecta marks have been erased by time and cosmic dust.

As you can see from the pictures there were a number of splash craters on this little round calculus, they all had small POI's and mineral deposits.

As you can see this one is indeed a moon and not a primary body;

As an interesting place to visit it doesn't really have anything in particular to attract the tourist or canyon running or base jumping sportsman, although the sky is somewhat interesting since it's the moon of a small ringed planet;

The beige seems far less pronounced from an orbital view and ringed planet for a backdrop is always nice.

Well here we are at Nu Tauri 1 a. It's strange that these really small bodies all seem so rounded, I have handed on many under 350km radius bodies and many of them are distorted potato shaped things, this appears to hold true right down to 250km and less, but these tiny things are all remarkably rounded and smooth. It may be a coincidence or something to do with the Stellar Forge.

So yes Nu Tauri 1 a is fairly round, just a bit distorted, as if someone leaned gently on the side of an exercise ball;

Again it's quite beige from the system map and also from orbit, but I am not 100% convinced that the colour is actually properly rendered. Most of these small bodies come out quite a different colour when you get near the surface. Again there was no volcanism so not a lot of point in searching the few canyons, they weren't outstanding in any way when compared to some I have found on slightly larger bodies. There was only the one splash crater on this little body, it's not really visible on the detailed view asit is on the very edge of the picture, you can just see the crater wall in one of the pictures so I had a look at that. I got a nice picture due to the sunset just coming on;

Again a moon rather than a planet with a very nice ringed primary. It was quite distant from the primary as well so I am wondering whether the smoothly rounded nature of these particular small planets is because they are far away from all other bodies to be clear of any great gravitational stress, that will need to be seen, I need a larger sample, keep your find coming please. Now finally the system details;

Well that's it for Nu Tauri 1 a, my next report may be a bit further in the future, I am running out of known small bodies in or near the bubble so it may take a while to get to my next target.

Well here we are again, today's tiny body is Coltan, a small moon in the Dahan system, I can't help leaving it with some small regret though. Despite being reported as volcanically active in the system map the little rock refused to give up its secrets. I must have circled it completely a number of times checking out canyons and craters and many other odd holes and marks, but not a sign, but on with the report.

So Coltan, again I am surprised how round this moon is, it appears there's some sort of process is action that makes bodies over 200km in radius funny shaped but smaller bodies round. I have only examined a few so far so this may just be a coincidence, never put down to mystery those thing that may simply be coincidence.

View it in all its rotund glory;

As you can see very round, it was actually quite grey when flying in, the area around the splash crater in the center of the first picture was rather broken up and had many canyons depressions. You can't really see it here but it was also quite pink in that are, I can only imagine this was caused by the impact, and impacts it has seen, it wasn't the most photogenic body so I grabbed this image of an impact crater for scale;

That must have been quite a bang on such a small body, I am surprised it remained in one piece. Of course Dahan is quite close to Sol, only 46.32ly, so if you have a hankering to see a small body, or even want to take up the search for volcanism where I left it a visit is well worth the time.

Oh yes here is the system map, there are a number of stations in the system so you can grab yourself a local base for the visit.

The Diaguandri system isn't far from Sol, only 127ly, this was an exciting one because it's first of these small planets I have found some volcanism on, while Coltan my last report supposedly had volcanism I wasn't actually able to find it.

It's a fairly standard system, three stars and while B 1 orbits the second it's actually quite close to the arrival point;

Again a nice round little planet,now I am sure this isn't correct, these little planets shouldn't be this round!

To show you what I mean B 1 has a big brother, B 2, quite a bit larger at over 400kms, logic should tell us that the larger the body the rounder it is, external forces being the same, so these two planets, orbiting the same sun and both fairly close, no other bodies close to either of them should be subject to the same conditions, but B 2 looks like it has been in a few to many boxing matches;

And as I said earlier, we do have volcanism, iron magma at lat 11.31, lon 63.64 if you have a hankering to visit a small planet with magma fumaroles;

Well that's it from Diaguandru B 1, next report will be from closer to home, Sol itself, I was intending to visit Metis, which I heard is quite small, but it seems to have vanished, cloaked by the Thargoids and being used as a secret spy base I expect, but there is another candidate in the Sol system.

What kind of planet is B2? The little round ones are all 100% metal so they're going to be denser and have stronger gravity than the same size of icy or rocky planet so their size where gravity is too strong for huge variations from a sphere to be supported by the strength of the planetary material will be that much smaller.

What kind of planet is B2? The little round ones are all 100% metal so they're going to be denser and have stronger gravity than the same size of icy or rocky planet so their size where gravity is too strong for huge variations from a sphere to be supported by the strength of the planetary material will be that much smaller.

I will check, however there seems to be a definite cut off in sizes. Also I have just finished visiting Hi'iaka in Sol (I haven't had a chance to post that one yet) which is rocky ice and 160km in radius and also very round as opposed to some of the similar composition bodies in the same area that are larger but not really rounded.

There are a number of circumstances I would expect to see small round bodies, if they were planetary core remnants, ie a metallic core of a planet left behind when the mainly lithic outer shell was stripped, possibly by an exploding or expanding sun, a collision between two bodies where the entire mass was heated to molten state and left to reform and cool without interference from external force. It shouldn't be that difficult to work out what size a body should be for a given density to work out if it is supposed to be round or not.

When we look at the list of gravitationally rounded objects in our solar system we see only one fits with what I have observed while visiting these small bodies, Mimas!

However when you look at the density of Mimas it is quite low compared to many of the others, more likely a rocky or icy body than a metallic body, so probably gained it's round shape from being melted and resolidifying rather than through gravitational pressure. many of the other small bodies in the solar system are quite a bit larger than Mimas and not round at all, Vesta for instance;

It's density is quite high, probably nickel iron, density alone is not enough to give small objects a very round shape, roughly round yes, but not to the extent I have been seeing here. Even very light bodies of low density if formed in a liquid state would cool to be more or less spherical and higher density bodies, if formed from material in an already cooled debris field wouldn't necessarily form round bodies.

Yes I would expect to see some round small bodies, but many of them I would expect not to be round no matter the composition.

update: Diagunadri B 2 is apparently high metal content according to EDDB but it doesn't give me the percentages, it isn't fully up to date, I have found a lot of information in EDDB is out of date or just wrong, I won't get a chance to fire up the game until later to double check.

Well hi again, today we go to where it all began, galactic coordinates 0, 0, 0, to be specific Hi'iaka, named after a Hawaiian princess, a small icy body far away from the heat of our friendly home fire Sol. I had intended to also visit Mimas while I was here, but apparently it's vanished, gone, dissapeared. Thargoids of course, they have cloaked it and are using it as a secret observation base to watch our every move.

Now Hi'iaka had me concerned for a while, despite being tiny I kept hitting the ground with unexpected vigour, I realised after checking what I thought was 0.048g actually said 0.48g, this is obviously incorrect, either that or it has a small core of consisting of Nuetronium. If you decide to pay it a visit, keep your shields up, the first time you land it will take you by surprise and try to kill you. I have lodged a report with the people responsible to see if we can't get that nuetronium core removed and the gravity returned to a sensible 0.048!

It is as I said a long way out, just over 22,000ls;

It appears to be a thin layer of rock covering an icy center, there's a crater that shows this layering, I suspect a deeper layer of rock with rather small core high in metal but that's only speculation based on percentage composition and the rocky surface layering that can't possibly contain enough rock to make up the listed percentage in the body, you can see from this image how thin the surface rock is;

Overall it follows the spherical pattern of small bodies I have been observing, it was suggested that small bodies, being mainly HMC are more likely to be round than larger rocky bodies, Hi'iaka seems to refute this possibility, but we must remember it's a hand placed body and not one generated by the stellar forge, and the gravity is also well over what it should be so I guess I need more samples. I shall keep going, meanwhile the surface map;